Green Fish
Lee Chang-dong: Three Restoration Premieres
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1h 51m
Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 111 mins | 1997
Already established as a novelist and playwright, Lee made the leap to the director’s chair with this spectacularly assured first feature, a scourging commentary on South Korean society dressed up in film noir trappings, focused on a freshly demobbed young man (Han Suk-gyu) who, after throwing in his lot with the local mob, finds himself in hot water when he starts an affair with his boss’s girlfriend. One of the more auspicious debuts in the history of South Korean cinema and a hit with audiences and critics alike, with Han’s improvised telephone booth monologue having achieved nothing less than iconic stature.
Up Next in Lee Chang-dong: Three Restoration Premieres
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Peppermint Candy
Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 130 mins | 1999
Opening on a shocking scene of implied suicide, Lee’s sophomore feature proceeds to move backward in time, its reverse chronology following its protagonist’s unhappiness to its source, following him from the end of the ’70s to the close of the ’90s—yea... -
Oasis
Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 133 mins | 2002
Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu), just out of prison, very little reformed, and shunned by his family, finds an unlikely soulmate in the person of Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a woman with severe cerebral palsy—and the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run for whic...
